Watercolour of the City Girl in a Rural Setting
by wildcatt
Summary: In which a certain Yamanaka finds a Domestic God in the most unlikely of men, unexpected happiness amidst a compost heap.....and herself, stripped bare and fancy free. AU, ShikaIno, four parter


**Written for _gladdecease _on LJ.  
**

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**Watercolour of the City Girl in a Rural Setting**

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**I. Summer**

Ino arrived at the Nara residence on a Sunday morning, squinting at the faded paintwork on the front door through dappled afternoon sunshine. After leaving the derelict excuse of a railway station she had found herself tottering on her heels through cobbled streets lined with picturesque little cottages, had expected her hosts to live in one of the same; said cottage, however, had turned out to be a renovated country manor, an elaborate, quaint Victorian affair tucked away at the further end of the village.

The landscape here was unfamiliarly bright, vivid hues harsher and rawer and_ realer_, down to the glimmers of overnight rain clinging to the overhead beams of the veranda. There, swirls of colour reflected the world the Yamanaka daughter had descended upon: hard cobalt sky, bottle green grass, wet chocolate earth. A million gaudy frequencies vibrating from the wildflowers blooming in every corner. Ino hated it. For a girl painted with a palette of pale, creamy skin, platinum blonde hair and pretty pastel blue eyes, the bold colours of the countryside were almost offensive; the rich, ripe red of the nearby tomato patch seemed crude, somehow, and the startling glimpse of a butterfly wing created a jarring interruption of bright yellow in the air.

Coming all the way from London to the dirt of the countryside was something Ino had never intended to do. Back home she had been comfortable in her middle income neighbourhood, sashaying down the concrete pavement with her handbag and plaited skirt and polished veneer of sophistication. Now she looked down; the tips of her heels were marked with mud. She was not accustomed to how she could breathe deeper, breathe cleaner, the _rawness_ of it: air like a crisp lettuce leaf.

Two smart raps on the front door; a minute later it was opened by a tall, lanky young man, slouching languidly in the doorway.

"Ino," he greeted her in a bored tone, eyeing her unenthusiastically from beneath a bristling head of spiky black hair, hands shoved into his pockets.

"Shikamaru." She nodded curtly and walked in when he stepped back to let her through, heels clipping loudly across the paneled floor as she dragged her suitcase to the bottom of the stairs. "My rooms are upstairs?"

"Third floor, on the right. We've sectioned off a guest living room and bathroom for you as well. Pa's out getting the groceries." He eyed her belongings as she began to make her way up without them. "Aren't you going to take those with you?"

She glanced down, surprised. "Aren't you going to take them up for me?"

"... ...No."

She found herself offended by the offended expression on his face. "Still charming as ever, I see," she commented disdainfully, before reaching down, snatching her suitcase and lugging it up the stairs. (But really, what had she expected of him? Shikamaru had been a no-good, lazy kind of fellow since their early childhood days together – before his family packed up and left London for the countryside - and it was hardly surprising that he hadn't changed at all.)

Despite the elaborate exterior, furnishings within the manor remained Spartan and strictly fancy-free, if comfortable, as befit the equally lethargic father and son who maintained the place. The older Nara had his bedrooms on the second floor and worked in the adjoining study when he was not called to the family deer parks surrounding the village; the third floor had been halved, with the left wing belonging to Shikamaru and the right cleared out for Ino. A small balcony jutted out from her bedroom, with what looked to be a rickety old ladder leading to the roof.

Shikaku Nara returned an hour later and opened the door to her assigned quarters to find them miraculously transformed into a polished suite, complete with carefully ironed jacket draped tastefully over the back of an armchair.

"Good to see you, Innie." He surveyed her handiwork while leaning against the doorway, mildly impressed. "Got everything sorted out already? You comfortable?"

Ino winced at the childhood nickname but smiled politely anyway, setting out a delicate arrangement of vases on the settee and arranging small bouquets of dried flowers into the glassware. "Yes, sir. I'm fine. Thank you for letting me board here."

"Don't mention it. I'll send a line over to your pa to tell him you arrived safely."

"Thank you. He'll appreciate it."

"Twelve years on, and you still look like a proper little doll," he told her affectionately. "Listen, Innie. About the money: forget it. I don't need you to pay rent. I've known your pa for years, I can't possibly accept-"

"Sir," she interrupted firmly. "Sir, my father insisted that I pay for boarding myself. It's alright; I should be getting an allowance from my apprenticeship with Ms Tsunade. I'd rather not be a burden."

"Hey now, 'course you won't be-"

"I'll pay by the week." Her tone was final. "Please charge me whatever your last boarder had to pay." Shikaku watched her in silence for a moment before shrugging, a faint smile tugging at his lips.

"Guess I'll leave you to your packing, then. You'll eat with us later tonight? I'm cooking – the boy and I've been sharing the household duties since his ma died – but my recipes ain't half bad, promise."

Ino glanced over at the kitchenette tucked into the other side of her living room. "No, thank you," she replied coolly. "I think I'll manage my meals myself."

"Up to you." Shikaku looked a little disappointed but shrugged again, slouching out into the corridors. "I'll give you a ride to Tsunade's tomorrow morning."

"Thank you." But he was already gone, and Ino collapsed onto her bed with a sigh, staring at the grubby white ceiling. What had her father been thinking, sending her all the way out into the middle of nowhere? He needed her help around the flower shop but had insisted – if she were to inherit and carry on the family store - that she spend at least a year out here studying under one mysterious Ms Tsunade, an apparent expert in gardening and botany who had retired in the area with a small plot of farmland and a greenhouse. Ino, unfortunately, was only truly interested in flower _arrangement_ – prided herself on her ability to fashion the most intricate structures from preserved stalks and paper-thin petals, and decorated her rooms with vases upon vases of her work. There was a certain fragility about dried, dead flowers that she admired and secretly wanted: a delicateness, of life stripped down to the brittle bones.

She remained sprawled on the bed until the afternoon ended and the light outside began to fade, playing despondently with the corner of her pillowcase. Cooking was too tiring; being wary of 'wholesome' country food (did they even _wash _their ingredients before cooking?) and being sadly lacking in culinary skills, she had packed enough canned vegetables to make salads for an entire week. She glanced once more at her kitchenette – sighed – extricated her can opener from her suitcase, and proceeded to make what promised to be a miserable, cold dinner.

--

"Oh for God's sake –" Ino banged the saucepan on the stove in frustration, sending a thin coat of black dust flying upwards and her into a violent fit of coughing. "Work, you ugly old thing! Work!"

Six evenings later, Ino's hoard of preserved food had been reduced to a single can of green peas. While admittedly flattering to her waistline, there was a limit as to Ino's capacity for malnourishment and so she had finally yielded to the demands of her stomach in the morning, and had carefully chosen some chicken stock and corn from the grocer's that looked reasonably sanitary. Now she was attempting, for the fifteenth time in the afternoon, to switch on the stove so she could boil the vegetables and make her first hot, if rather meager, soup for the week.

"Everything alright?"

She turned abruptly towards the doorway at the irritatingly familiar drawl, sweaty blonde tangles flying around her face. Shikamaru had stuck his head in and was watching her violent administrations, looking rather amused.

"Yes! I'm fine," she informed him briskly, tangling her reddening fingers into her apron. "Can I help you?"

"Che. You start the stove like this." Shikamaru ignored her easily and, strolling lazily across the room to the kitchenette, proceeded to fiddle about with the various knobs and switches, producing a warm flicker in a matter of seconds. He glanced over at her wryly. "How have you managed to cook anything the past week without using this thing?"

"I haven't," she replied crossly, embarrassed. "What do you want?"

"You haven't?" he drawled. "On a diet?"

"I-" She bristled, unconsciously rising to her tiptoes in a vain attempt to match his height. The two of them had managed to avoid each other quite effectively in the manor since she had arrived and she wanted him out of her rooms, _now_. "Are you trying to imply – I mean, I-"

"Che. How troublesome. Here, the bill for the week. You said you wanted it." Not bothering to wait for her imminent threats of torture, Shikamaru had already turned away, slapping an envelope onto the tablecloth and ambling out into the hallways, hands stuffed back into his pockets. Ino slammed the door behind him, seething.

Collapsing onto a dining chair once the soup was boiling away, she rested her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands, hating the way they had coarsened over the week. Her apprenticeship with Tsunade had turned out to be the stuff of nightmares. After very disrespectfully laughing off her love for dried flowers and their arrangement, Tsunade had, on the very first day, ordered her to get down on her knees and start preparing a heap of thick compost for an entire field of – of all things - carrots. Ino had been required to stick her beautifully manicured hands into that thick, dark mound of rot and work it into the soil around the plants manually, under the blazing summer sun and watchful eye of her teacher, who constantly barked instructions as to how to shape and pat and loosen the soft earth. The subsequent few days had been much of the same – toiling away in the fields to the charming sound of Tsunade's braying donkey, Jiraiya; cleaning the entire glasshouse; watering the herb garden; chasing runaway cows from the carrots; plucking away daisies from between what were apparently very normal and very homely shrubs; doctoring the infection in the apple tree growing near the tool-shed. Not a single rose, lily or orchid in sight, nor any sign of a pretty vase. Tsunade preferred plain old vegetables to flowers; live flowers to dead ones; liked to let them grow haphazardly, thickly when possible, instead of arranging them into artificial silhouettes. And to make matters worse, it turned out that she had taken on another apprentice: Sakura Haruno, a pink haired young thing, less pretty than her (naturally) but embarrassingly more resourceful when it came to working in the garden.

Grumbling, Ino picked up the envelope Shikamaru had left on the table and ripped it open. On it, written with his rambling scrawl, was a short line stating what Ino owed the Nara household for the week: forty-five pounds.

Tsunade was giving her a hundred pounds a week. She had already spent most of the money on a pretty straw hat last Tuesday, various little trinkets from a jewelry shop she had discovered on an exploratory jaunt through the village, a parasol (so she could take her late afternoon walks in style), getting the heels of her lace up boots fixed and cleaned, some handkerchiefs hand-sewn by a local village girl and the food she had bought this morning. Leaving thirty pounds left – fifteen short of what she needed for rent.

Ino glanced forlornly at the beautifully constructed wreath of dried roses she had hung on the wall before slamming her forehead back against the table. This………..was not what she had come all the way here for. She could already feel her refinement chipping away along with her candy pink nail polish; Ino Yamanaka was really a coarser, tougher being underneath the carefully tailored clothes and delicate hair and haughty social graces, something she had always been able to hide amongst the other city girls. Now she felt as if she was going to be untied, loosened, rubbed down to her essence and the very idea of such exposure frightened her.

A knock on the door rudely disturbed her private pity orgy.

"Please go away," she moaned, squeezing her eyes tightly shut.

Another knock.

"I said, _go away!" _

The door was thrown open and Shikamaru stalked in with uncustomary haste, making his way directly to the stove.

"Your food is burning, woman," he snapped testily, switching off the fire and lifting the lid off her pot of soup. It was only then that Ino noticed the thick smoke billowing above her kitchenette and drifting out under the door; she hadn't even registered the smell of burning in the depths of her self indulgent misery. Paling, she threw open the windows before hurrying over to find that all the chicken stock had boiled away, leaving a black, charred coating of corn-and-peas-turned-coal on the bottom of the pot.

"Perfect. Just, perfect," she muttered, flushing, snatching the pot from Shikamaru's grasp and running it under the tap. "I'm sorry. I'll be more careful next time."

"Che. Try not to burn the house down every time you decide to cook," he sighed, not moving from her side and merely watching her scrape at the pot with a ladle. A pause. "What are you going to do for supper, then?"

"I'll just skip it tonight. I'm not hungry anyway," Ino gritted out irritably.

Naturally, her stomach chose that exact moment to let out a loud growl. Ino glared at said stomach. "Not hungry at all," she instructed loudly.

Shikamaru rolled his eyes. "Look, pa's out at the deer park till Tuesday and I have spare groceries in the fridge. I can make extra for you if you want."

"I don't need your help."

"I'm making baked potatoes tonight."

"Don't want it."

"With corned beef and onion sauce. Homemade."

"Not interested."

"Think I'll whip up some cream of corn to go with it, too... ...and pa's been nagging me to try out the apple pie recipe he got off the Akimichi's."

"No, thank you."

"Why must women be so difficult?" Shikamaru closed his eyes briefly in suffering. "Look," he began again slowly, "I need some help preparing supper tonight. It's troublesome to cook and clean up all by myself. Why don't you help me, and I'll teach you how to make the dishes along the way."

A pause. Ino's stomach growled again.

"Well?" Shikamaru tilted his head to the side impatiently.

"You really need my help?" she asked in a small voice, looking away and swallowing.

"Yes," he sighed. "Come down after you've finished cleaning up." And with that, he slouched out the doorway, leaving Ino staring at the black stained pot in the sink.

Shikamaru had already finished peeling the potatoes by the time she made her way down. The kitchen had a low ceiling but was spacious and well lit; golden afternoon sunlight glinted off the metal sink and washed across the large table taking up the middle of the room, tinting his hands copper as he sliced the potatoes with practiced ease.

"Your shirt's not ironed," she observed offhandedly as she made her way closer, eyeing the ingredients assembled before him. He didn't bother acknowledging her comment.

"Get started with the onions, will you?" He nodded towards a small basket resting at the other end of the table. Ino slid it closer, not really knowing what he expected of her. What did one do with a raw onion? Especially – she now noticed in revulsion – one still with remnants of earth resting on the crisp yellowy skin. Despite having worked with vegetables in their natural environment for an entire week she had still failed to make the connection between the idea of raw produce and a hygienically prepared meal.

She eyed the sacrilegious vegetable with distaste. "It's got dirt on it."

"Never."

Luckily for him Ino missed the sarcasm in his tone; she was far too busy poking the poor thing with a fingernail. "Shall I throw it away?"

"What? Ino, run it under the tap and scrub at it like a normal human being, will you?"

"Right." Her stomach grumbled again and she nodded, grabbing the onion with self-sacrificing determination and plunging it into the sink. "And then?"

"Chop it up. Thinly. Do it quickly, too, or else you'd start crying and that'd be really troublesome."

"Right."

"Knives are in the drawer over there."

"Got it."

A pause.

"Ino, surgical precision is not required in the cutting of an onion. You're doing it far too slowly – look, your eyes are going red. Che, how unattractive."

"Shut up!" Ino whirled around and tried to glare at him, but only succeeded in squinting menacingly (and increasingly tearfully). "I'm doing my best, alright? I've never really had to cook back home, so it's not like I've got any experience in the matter."

"Any experience in the matter," Shikamaru mimicked amusedly in that laid back drawl of his. "So what _have _you been eating for the past week?"

"Salads. Vegetables, some cans I brought from home. You know, the usual." She waved her hand in a vague gesture, the knife slicing through the air.

"Canned rubbish? When we're living in the middle of god knows how many acres of farmland?" Shikamaru looked disgusted, tossing the sliced potatoes into a large pot of water. "You know, they say I'm lazy, but even I'd get up and cook a proper meal for myself every day."

"It's not that I'm not bothered," Ino tried explaining, "It's just –for the sake of general cleanliness, I – look, the onions – and I don't know-"

"-How to cook. I can tell. Have you finished butchering that thing?"

Ino paused and looked down to see that, in her desperation to explain to Shikamaru the extremely logical reasons for eating canned food amidst an abundance of fresh produce, she had reduced the onion to a mangled carcass on the chopping board. "Oh. Yes, I'm done with it. Where do you want it?"

"Away from you." Shikamaru deftly retrieved the pulverized vegetable and eyed the knife in her hand warily. "Why don't you just stick to washing the rest of the stuff?" He pointed to the corn. "At least I can rely on your manic cleaning streak to make sure_ that's_ done properly."

"Very funny," Ino sniffed, but took the corncobs from the pantry shelf and began scrubbing away industriously. The two worked quietly and quickly, with Shikamaru giving her terse, precise instructions as he put together their meal. To her surprise she found him a decent teacher as he explained to her how to go about preparing the food – mostly because he himself had never bothered to learn anything requiring any real effort or culinary flair, hence ensuring the barebones nature of each dish.

One hour later her first proper supper of the week had been set out on the dining table and various dirty pots and pans left strewn inside the kitchen sink; a delicious smelling apple pie was baking in the oven, the heady scent of cinnamon wafting into the air. An obviously exhausted Shikamaru collapsed onto his chair, loosening the collar of his crumpled shirt.

"Aren't you going to change into some proper clothes before we eat?" Ino had, with remarkable speed and dexterity, dashed upstairs and slipped into a smart-casual little pink frock.

"... ...No."

She tried again patiently. "Back home, whenever we ate with company, pa would make us change into something more... ...appropriate."

"... ...No."

"Shikamaru!" Forgetting momentarily just who she was faced with, she pouted girlishly in the manner that had always gotten her what she wanted in London. "Go change!"

"You nag like an old housewife," he informed her calmly, leaning forwards and picking at his plate without waiting for her settle down. Ino huffed but paused when she caught the way he glanced up discreetly at her deepening pout, a small smile lifting the corner of his lips. "Just sit down and eat, woman."

So she did. (And wondered why her cheeks were heating up uncomfortably, or why she couldn't even bring herself to scold him for leaving his elbows on the table. Strange, strange indeed.)

She was still blushing when, half an hour later, she put down a forkful of apple pie, fixed her gaze intently on her nearly empty plate, and asked in a small voice: "Shikamaru?"

He had been staring vacantly out the window during most of their meal and now turned towards her, a cautious expression on his face. "Hmm?"

"Shikamaru... ...about the rent for the week... ..."

"What about it?" He raised an eyebrow.

"I don't have enough money to pay for it right now," she blurted out embarrassedly. "I forgot to keep an eye on my expenses and... ...and I'm a little short, for the time being. I'm sorry."

"Che." He snorted, sticking his fork into his slab of pie. "Ino, you know you don't even have to pay if you don't want to. Pa's fine with you staying here for free."

"No!" She shook her head, flushing more fiercely than ever. "I'm... ...I'm not some kind of charity case."

Shikamaru looked exasperated. "I never implied that –"

"I'll pay you back," she interrupted firmly. "I promise. As soon as Tsunade gives me my next allowance I'll pay the rent. I'm just asking that you give me some more time, that's all."

A pause.

"Fine." He shrugged, clearly not interested in continuing the conversation further. Standing up, he shoved his hands back into his pockets and ambled away from the table. "I'm finished. See you tomorrow."

"What?" Her head shot up. "What about the dirty plates in the kitchen?"

"You may clean them."

"Aren't you going to help?"

"... ...No." She heard a low chuckle drift down as he made his way up the stairs and turned the corner.

"Shikamaru!" Ino was up in an instant, clambering up after him, but to her frustration he had moved with unexpected speed and was now nowhere to be found despite her avid searching of the entire manor - as if he had simply vanished, without a trace.

"_Shikamaru!" _she yelled again, for the moment too outraged to care that she was being thoroughly un-ladylike as she trudged back down to face the mound of dirty crockery waiting in the kitchen.

It was going to be a long night.


End file.
